Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island (22 page)

Patti stayed behind to photograph horseshoe crabs and collect seashells while Carol headed home to feed her animals. On her hike back to the cabin, Carol rounded a bend in the road and suddenly felt chills ripple across her goose-bumped skin. The hairs on her forearm stood on end. Just then, Louie appeared from behind an oak.

“We must find a way to get along,” he said.

Carol tried to act calm. “You gotta lay off the liquor, Louie. You don’t have control of yourself anymore.”

“I’ll stop drinking if you’ll come back to me.”

“We can be friends. But my feelings go no further.”

His face dropped. “It’s all just fun and games to you, isn’t it!” He yanked her braids and pulled her face against his. “I swear I’ll kill you for doing this to me!”

Carol wrestled free of his grasp and ran for her cabin. When she got inside, the electricity had been cut. Through the window, she watched Louie disappear down the road.

“I’m sorry, Carol, but I need to go,” Patti said when she returned from the beach. She was supposed to be writing a story about Carol’s turtle research, not the violent stalkings of her ex-lover.

“Please stay one more night,” Carol pleaded. “My parents will arrive tomorrow. Don’t leave me here alone.”

Patti agreed to stay. Carol lit candles and cooked a supper of stir-fried venison and greens on the woodstove. After a soothing glass of wine, their jumpy nerves began to calm.

Then they heard a scratch on the screen of the porch window that stopped the food in their throats.

“Open the door, Carol!” Louie shouted.

“You’re scaring me, Louie!” Carol shouted, her voice trembling.

“Go away! Please go away!” Patti screamed.

There was a long silence. Through the porch window, his eyes roved from Carol to Patti in a cold, inscrutable stare. Finally he turned and walked out into the darkness.

Just before dawn, they heard another noise in the yard. It was Jesse, coming by for his morning drink. He sat on a pine stump smoking a cigarette. Relieved, Carol poured him an extra-tall glass of bourbon and told him what had happened.

“I sho don’t wanna be here when yo daddy sees yo face.”

Her parents drove through the night to catch the morning ferry at the St. Marys dock. Pelicans perched atop the barnacle-covered concrete pilings as they climbed aboard the
Cumberland Queen
, a paint-chipped, double-decker boat carrying 150 passengers—Boy Scout troops, backpackers, young couples, and day-tripping seniors.

On the one-hour ride over to the island, the ferry meandered through jade-green marshes lined with snowy egrets.
The ferry crossed the sound and hugged the southern rim of Cumberland, where horses grazed in the marshes near the Dungeness ruins. Passengers jockeyed for position along the starboard deck to snap photos. At Sea Camp dock, two deckhands tied the boat to the piers. As Carol’s parents disembarked, a manatee and her calf grazed in the grassy shallows beside the dock.

Carol felt like an eight-year-old running into her mother’s arms.

“You’re coming back to Atlanta for a while,” her dad told her.

Patti left on the ferry, and Carol returned to her cabin with her parents to pack up her belongings. That afternoon, Carol and Earl tinkered with the jeep while Anne grilled pork tenderloin from a hog Carol had shot on the beach a few days earlier.

Around sunset, Louie knocked. To his surprise, Earl opened the door.

“I was hoping to talk privately with Carol,” Louie stammered.

“You need to stay away from her,” Earl said, pointing a finger at him.

“We’ve got to work it out.”

“You’ve got to move on.” Earl folded his arms across his chest.

“This is between Carol and me.”

“You knocked my daughter unconscious. What kind of a man suckerpunches a woman?”

Louie glared at Carol, standing in the doorway. “You know, there’s some folks on this island who think she got what she deserved.”

13

“My world is falling down around me,” Carol wrote in her journal after four months away from Cumberland. “What a waste! So many good things I could be doing on the island instead of twiddling my thumbs here.”

Carol was thirty-nine and living with her parents in Atlanta. Not much had changed since she last lived under their roof. They followed their same routines: drinks at five, dinner at six, the television blaring in the background to drown out the uncomfortable silence. Earl and Anne bickered constantly, but they teamed up to berate Carol for living alone on a wild island and not settling down with a suitable husband.

Carol didn’t think she would ever return to Cumberland. She would never be safe there with Louie stalking her. So she started exploring the north Georgia mountains again. She went mushroom gathering and ginseng hunting with her old homesteader friend Mamie and started scouting for property in Appalachia. Grudgingly, she even made plans to rent out her Cumberland cabin.

But she deeply missed the island. The island was her center of gravity, her north star. It was where she found her bearings. Without it, she felt lost and unanchored.

She ached for the island every evening when the moon rose. As it shone through her open window, she listened to the song of the sea in a whelk shell that sat beside her bed. In those moments, she closed her eyes and could almost feel herself crouched in the dunes, listening to the purr of the ocean, whispering to a nesting sea turtle as she counted her eggs.

Then Louie’s shadow stalked across the moon, and she awoke, sweating and shuddering. On the island, fear had followed her everywhere. She couldn’t go back to that life. Slowly, gently, she let go of the island, like sand slipping through her fingers.

On a cloudy April morning in 1980, Carol was dissecting a D.O.R. possum in her parents’ basement and listening to the news on the radio: Mount Saint Helens had begun to smolder, rookie Wayne Gretzky had scored his record-setting fiftieth goal, the United States had announced it would boycott the Olympics in Moscow, and President Carter had just broken off diplomatic relations with Iran.

The phone rang, and Carol picked up.

“Hey, Carol. It’s Jesse.”

“Jess! It’s great to hear your voice. Have you been feeding my chickens?”

“Oh yea, every mornin. They sho miss you.”

“I miss them too. More than you know.”

“You can come back now, Carol. Louie’s found hisself a new woman. You ain’t got nuthin to worry about no mo.”

Carol packed up immediately and headed for Cumberland the next morning. When she arrived back on the island, she dashed straight for the ocean, dunking herself in the wild waters. All of the anguish left her. Saltwater dripped down her cheeks, and she tasted the island again.

Her hair was still wet when she arrived back at her cabin. It hadn’t been burned down like she expected—not even a broken window. Carol flung open the fence gate and stood in the yard, letting her senses soak it all in again: the scent of fresh cedar, a puff of wind tickling the pines, the olive braids of Spanish moss hanging from live oaks. Everything was silent and still.

Too still. Where were her chickens?

She walked over to the coop and found half-eaten carcasses and feathers strewn everywhere. Raccoon tracks surrounded the coop.

She stormed over to see Jesse, who was working on his boat at the Candler dock.

“What the hell, Jess? My chickens were eaten by coons. How’d you let that happen?”

“I’z sorry Carol.”

“If you lied about feeding my chickens, did you lie about Louie, too?”

Jesse hung his head.

“Dang it, Bailey! How could you do this?”

“It was Louie’s idea. He missed you.”

“He’s threatened to kill me, Jess!”

“Truth is, I missed you too.”

Carol sighed. She couldn’t stay mad at Jesse. She sat on the dock beside him and dipped her toes into the water. But a sinking dread had already begun to settle back in.

The next day, she went to the National Park Service headquarters to talk with the chief ranger. “I wish we could help,” he said. “But park rangers can’t get involved with domestic disputes.” She visited the St. Mary’s Police Station on the mainland, but they told her Cumberland Island was outside of its jurisdiction. She asked the Camden County Sheriff’s Department to issue a restraining order against Louie, but they said it would be difficult to enforce. It seemed no one could protect Carol from a man threatening to kill her.

Sure enough, Louie showed up drunk at her door a few days after she had returned. Carol told him to leave.

“I’ve talked with the cops about taking out a peace warrant,” she said.

“You sign a peace warrant, you sign your death warrant!” he snarled.

She was afraid to close her eyes that night. She finally got out of bed at 3
A.M.
and went to work on her turtle research, hoping that a return to routine might calm her. The window above her desk faced Louie’s road. With every leaf flutter or twig snap, she glanced wide-eyed out the glass into the darkness.

“There is no feeling like trying to work at your desk and waiting for a bullet to hit your brain,” she wrote in her journal that morning. “I wonder what it will feel like. Will I hear the sound of the gun firing? How many fractions of a second will it take for the bullet to pass through my skull?”

Jesse didn’t show up for his sunrise cocktail. So Carol hopped in her jeep and headed out to the beach early. The sun was blood red, casting liquid fire across the ocean. Dozens of dead sea turtles littered the beach from her four-month absence. Vultures had picked over most of them.

At the South Cut beach crossing, Carol noticed two figures atop the dunes. Hikers usually didn’t venture this far up the island, so she walked closer. It was Ebby and Betty, watching the sunrise from the tallest dunes on Cumberland.

“I need your help,” Carol said to Betty. “Please keep Louie away from me. I don’t want trouble. I just want to be left alone.”

“You think I can control what he does?”

“Can you at least help reel in his drinking?”

Betty looked vacantly out across the ocean. “You knew what you were getting yourself into,” she said flatly.

Carol made plans to leave the island again. Returning to her parents’ house in Atlanta was unthinkable, so she contacted her aunt in Rochester, New York. Her aunt’s health was declining, and it seemed like an opportune time to reconnect and lend a hand. From Rochester, she could explore the wildlands of the Adirondacks, searching for quiet hollers and deep forest coves. She began packing for another extended absence.

She slept in the dunes that night, afraid to stay in her cabin alone with Louie skulking about. The next morning, just before heading back to the cabin to pack up, Carol spotted vultures congregating on the beach. A dead loggerhead had washed ashore, and Carol recognized it instantly by its massive, barnacled back. She checked the turtle’s tag to confirm: it was the giant turtle that Carol had ridden bareback a few months earlier.

“I’m sorry, girl.” Carol said. “We’re a rotten bunch.”

She glanced at her watch. The sun was already high in the sky, and if she stuck around to necropsy her, she would miss the boat off the island. But she couldn’t leave her bareback turtle to rot. So she decided to stay on the island one more day. She gripped her knife and plunged in.

“Shucks, girl. You’re loaded with eggs.” Carol scooped them out of the disemboweled turtle. She filled her hat with eggs and carried them deep into the dunes to bury them.

Carol returned to the carcass. As she was untangling the turtle’s ropy intestines, a young, sandy-haired backpacker hiking up the beach approached.

“Can I have a look?” he said.

He squatted down for closer inspection. Carol was impressed. Most casual observers cringed at the stench and gore, but here was a kid genuinely interested in what the turtle could teach him. His name was Pete DiLorenzo, and he had been camping on Cumberland for a week.

“This island is paradise,” he said. “I feel like I’m strolling through Eden.”

All his life, Pete had been a devout Christian. Lately, though, his faith had been faltering. The twenty-two-year-old had fallen into
drugs and alcohol and lost his way. His camping trip to Cumberland had cleansed his spirit, and he felt born again.

It turned out that Pete was also from Rochester. Short on cash, he planned to hitchhike back to Rochester after his camping adventures on Cumberland. He was a Jesus freak, but he seemed like a nice enough kid, Carol thought. And she didn’t want to be alone with Louie stalking her. So Carol offered him a ride to Rochester, as long as he didn’t mind waiting until tomorrow to leave. Pete eagerly agreed, and he hopped in the jeep with Carol. As they drove past the road to Half Moon Bluff, Louie, watching from the woods, saw a handsome young guy with wavy blond hair riding next to Carol.

That evening, Pete set up his tent in the yard beside the chicken coop while Carol cooked supper. She was relieved to have company with Louie still prowling around. When Pete came inside for dinner, Carol locked the door behind him from the inside, leaving the key in the knob. Ever since Louie had punched her, Carol had been locking herself in. She checked the window to see if Louie was lurking.

“Would you like a drink?” Carol asked.

“I’m trying to lay off the liquor,” he said. “Been sober for five weeks.”

“How about some water then? It’s the sweetest water on the island, straight from a spring.”

Pete sat at the kitchen table sipping his water while Carol marinated a mess of coon and collards.

“Do you belong to a church?” he asked.

“I worship in the cathedral of nature.”

“I mean a real church.”

“There’s nothing more real than nature.”

“What about a house of worship?”

“Well, I sweep and clean that abandoned church every month,” Carol said, nodding to the First African Baptist Church across from her cabin. “Does that earn me some points?”

He smiled. “I guess what I’m asking is: what do you believe in?”

“Truth,” she replied.

Suddenly, they heard footsteps on the porch. It was Louie, carrying a broken canoe paddle with a sharp, splintered end. He rattled the locked knob. Then there was a bang-bang-bang against the door.

“Open up!” Louie shouted.

Carol’s heart exploded out of her chest. “Go away!”

“Open the goddamn door!”

Pete clenched his water glass tightly and looked wide-eyed at Carol.

The door shook in its frame. Louie kicked in the bottom door panel. Pete jumped out of his chair and crouched behind the table. Carol shrieked.

“Please, Louie! Leave me alone!”

“Who’s in there with you, dammit?”

He broke through the rest of the door panel. Scraps of wood fell to the floor. Louie’s full figure appeared behind the empty door frame.

“Are you already screwing someone else, you fucking whore?” he shouted.

Instinct took over. The sawed-off shotgun that Louie had given her was tucked behind the bathroom door, loaded. Carol was on autopilot. She ran to the bathroom and grabbed the gun.

Pete cowered in the corner, hands clenched in prayer. Louie was waving the canoe paddle and shouting.

“You just want to have fun? I’ll show you fun!” He began to step through the empty door frame and into the cabin just as Carol returned to the kitchen.

“You fucked with the wrong guy!” he shouted, and busted through the door toward her.

Carol had only one shot. There would be no time to reload if she missed. She had to make it count. She raised the shotgun and steadied it, braced snugly against her hip, like her father had taught her.

She held her breath and squeezed the trigger. The gun fired, kicking hard against her hip. The report rattled the floorboards and shook Pete’s water glass on the table.

Then the room went silent. A haze of smoke lifted from the barrel. She had shot Louie squarely in the chest. The impact knocked him back, and his body slumped to the porch.

Carol reloaded and prepared to shoot again, then stopped herself. No, no, no, don’t act like a psycho, she told herself. But she kept the gun sighted on Louie.

“Is he dead?” she asked, frozen with fear. Pete peeked over the table at the motionless body in the doorway.

“I think so.”

“Tell me he’s dead, because I can’t look. I can’t look.”

Pete walked over to the door. Louie lay lifeless, pooled in blood. His chest was still.

“Yeah, he’s dead.”

Carol lowered her gun and collapsed to the floor. The gunshot still echoed in her ears, and she couldn’t stop shaking. For a few moments, she swirled in and out of consciousness. Everything felt uncoupled from its shoring. She could only hitch herself to one hard truth: She was alive, and Louie was dead. It was over. It was finally over.

Or so she thought.